History Is Written By The Economic Victors
Title: “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010”
Author: Charles Murray
Rank: 15
Blurb: “The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.”
Review: “Murray explains that white America has grown increasingly divided along class lines. There is a clear moral case being made here. The lower class is falling into illegitimacy, crime, and poverty while the upper class is excelling in education, career, and family. The main cause is simple: primarily, a devaluation of white middle class values brought on by increased intervention by the government. This intervention takes the form of welfare support, in which the government gives incentive for people to break apart families and avoid work. Meanwhile, the upper class is left alone to prosper in its highly technical fields.”
Featured Review by Niall Ferguson: “The key point is that the four great social trends of the past half-century — the decline of marriage, of the work ethic, of respect for the law and of religious observance — have affected [poor, uneducated] Fishtown much more than [wealthy, educated] Belmont. As a consequence, the traditional bonds of civil society have atrophied in Fishtown. And that, Murray concludes, is why people there are so very unhappy — and dysfunctional.”
Customers Also Bought: “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun” by Paul M. Barrett
Footnote: After thirty years of fucking over the poor, it’s about time somebody got around to blaming them.
Coming Apart [Amazon]
Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]
Ironic too…
Kennedy/LBJ -8 years
Nixon/Ford -8 years
Carter -4 years
“Belmont” reached its economic nadir in the late 70s.
Reagan -8 (sort of) years
Bush I – 4 years
Clinton -8 years
Bush the dumber – 8 long years
Obama -2 years
“Belmont’s” been doing awesome since.
ONE OF THE BELL CURVE ASSHOLES? It’s too early in the morning for this shit.
TJ/ Anyone see Chronicle?
As to the blaming the poor part, can’t the blurb be read as justifying a feeling of victimhood and resentment among the white not-rich population? Victims of what happened after our government decided to give white people’s money away to . . . the blacks? Hey Murray, who’s in the White House, you putz?
I’m sure the Medicis and the Rothschilds and the Habsburgs and the Plantagenets and the Tudors all felt pretty much the same way about the not-rich people. The poor all should have chosen different mothers.
I’m shocked by Niall Ferguson’s encomium. He must surely know better.
All this yap about how institutions that have been steady since the dawn of time is, of course, garbage. The periods of relative peace and prosperity, with stable families and institutions, are the anomalies. Most of the world for most of history has lived in a state of chaos. As for marriage, that has always been a luxury indulged in when people felt some measure of security. For most of history the poor didn’t bother with getting married since they had no reasonable expectation of ever acquiring anything worth handing on.
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